Perhaps 2012 will be the year that solid state drives (SSDs) finally dip to $1 per gigabyte, or even lower depending on how the market plays out. High prices compared to mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs) have prevented SSDs from making a serious run at the mainstream market, but Ultrabooks as gain popularity, the demand for NAND flash memory is growing fast, and that could lead to lower costs.
There was no dearth of ultrabook announcements at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. But it still remains to be seen whether or not all these ultrabooks can go onto capture a large chunk of the notebook market as Intel wants them to. Market research firm IHS iSuppli is among those who expect ultrabook shipments to soar rapidly over the next few years. Having previously predicted “major repercussions for the global electronics supply chain” owing to a boom in ultrabook shipments, the firm has now specifically identified cache solid state drives (SSDs) as a likely beneficiary of such a boom.
SanDisk scooted into the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) with a pair of high speed SDXC cards in tow. Actually, the SanDisk Extreme SDXC UHS-I series, available in 64GB and 128GB capacities, is the fastest of its kind on this or any other world (until little green aliens land on Earth and prove otherwise, anyway), featuring read and write speeds of up to 45MB/s, according to SanDisk.
The joint collaboration between chip giants Intel and Micron has resulted in a new benchmark in NAND flash technology. Specifically, the two tech gurus announced the world's first 20nm (not just nanometer-class, but an actual 20nm process) 128Gb (gigabit) multilevel-cell (MLC) device they say is ideal for small form factor tablets, smartphones, solid state drives, and high-performance compute devices.
Hitachi and Intel are fast becoming best buddies in the storage space, and why not, the two apparently play very well together. The latest effort from these two tech heavyweights is Hitachi's new Ultrastar SSD400M multi-level cell (MLC) solid state drive family. Pitched as a cost-effective alternative to those pricey single-level cell (SLC) SSDs, these new drives are built using Intel's 25nm enterprise-grade MLC NAND flash memory, Hitachi says.
SandForce has built quite a name for itself by building high-end solid state drive controllers employed in a number of enthusiast level SSDs, and the company doesn't show any signs of slowing down. After launching its second generation SF-2200 (SATA 6Gbps) and SF-2100 (SATA 3Gbps) chipsets earlier this year, SandForce says it's now prepared to demonstrate a prototype SSD built with Toshiba's 24nm multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory.
Toshiba announced it has enhanced its NAND flash portfolio with new embedded NAND flash memory devices that feature toggle-mode DDR NAND for improved performance. These higher performing 24nm e-MMC devices wedge open the bottlenecks typically associated with single data rate NAND, enabling faster random access and sequential performance. The icing on the cake is that they're cheaper to boot, a combination we'll take 8 days a week.
Toshiba and its manufacturing partner SanDisk officially cut the ribbon on their third 300mm wafer NAND fabrication facility at Toshiba's Yokkaichi Operations in Mie Prefecture, Japan. They're calling it Fab 5, which has nothing to do with the 1991 University of Michigan men's 
Geeks don't accessorize quite the same as norms. Matching your shoes with your shirt places you at the top of the fashion totem pole at most computer conventions. That being said, everybody likes a bit of flair every now and again, and geeks are no different. When you want to draw admiring "Ooohs" and "Aaahs" out of your tech-loving pals, you can pull Mimobot's new retro Transformer USB drives out of your pocket and rest easy knowing you're sporting the Gucci of the gadget world.
Why lug around a USB 2.0 flash drive when you could slip a SuperSpeed USB 3.0 stick onto your keychain? Oh, your PC isn't equipped with a USB 3.0 port? Point taken as we shake an angry fist at Intel and AMD. Still, at some point USB 3.0 ports will become commonplace, so if you're the type that likes to think ahead, a USB drive like Kingston's DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 Generation 2 (DTU30G2) is about as future proof as you can get at the moment.Connect with MaximumPC
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